Q: Is this all free?
A: Yes! All of the assessments you see here and the service that lets you give these assessments to your students are free and always will be. We have developed this site to help instructors improve their teaching and publishing economic education research, and we have no desire to "monetize" the site.
Q: How did you develop these assessments?
A: Our development process is in large part based on the procedure described in Adams and Wieman (2011). We start by documenting the learning goals we want to test and drafting a set of corresponding multiple-choice questions. We then recruit faculty here and outside Cornell to provide us with feedback on whether the learning goals capture the most important course content and whether the assessment evaluates expert-level thinking. Following revisions, we conduct interviews with undergraduate students who have previously taken the course where they verbalize their thought process as they answer the questions. Based on these interviews, we remove ambiguity in questions and add options that correspond to common mistakes.
At the end of the process, our assessments are piloted internally (with Cornell students) and externally in real classrooms. This allows us to compute standard measures of test quality and report national mean performance overall and by learning goal. Some of the assessments available here are still in the process of being piloted externally.
Q: What other assessments are under development?
A: Several! The Cornell Suite of Economics Assessments will soon include:
- MI-ESSA: Math-Intensive Economics Statistics Skills Assessment
- TESA: Theory-based Econometrics Skills Assessment
- BESA: Behavioral Economics Skills Assessment
If you are interested in piloting or providing input on any of these assessments, we would love to work with you. Contact us!